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BFI Most Wanted

Highlights

This stylishly creepy film was the British selection for Cannes in 1974 but for the years since has only been available on poor VHS copies. Then, in 2014, a negative was discovered…
Wednesday 13 April 2016

The missing 1923 film Love, Life and Laughter, considered one of the finest British features at the time and part of the BFI Most Wanted search for 75 ‘missing’ British films, has been found at an archive in Amsterdam.
Thursday 3 April 2014

“BFI Most Wanted is the kind of initiative that every country should undertake. It is vitally important work that needs to be done.”

— Martin Scorsese

Film history is littered with tales of films destroyed, junked or lost, whether through laboratory fires, production companies going bankrupt or because they were simply no longer seen as commercially valuable. Most films of the silent period are gone – once sound came in, no one imagined silent films would ever be of interest again. Early cellulose nitrate prints, still in use until 1951, contained small amounts of silver and when films came to the end of their run, they were often melted down to remove the precious metal. There are also more sinister tales of prints deliberately destroyed by studios when they obtained the rights to remake a title, as MGM tried to do with the 1940 version of Gaslight.

Here at the BFI National Archive, we’re committed to filling the gaps in the national collection and are asking the nation to help us; this list of 75 ‘Most Wanted’ British films contains titles we would like to preserve and make available. So this is a call to arms to the public as well as collectors and archivists around the world – check attics and cellars, sheds and vaults and let the hunt begin for the BFI Most Wanted.

If you have film material on any of these titles, or any clues to where we might track it down, please contact us at fictioncurators@bfi.org.uk.